'Vanya,' 'Water' top Globe lineup

New artistic chief Edelstein's first season includes big names, wide variety

David Hyde Pierce (left) and Sigourney Weaver in the Broadway production of "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike." The Old Globe Theatre has just announced that it is bringing the play to San Diego as part of the theater's 2013-14 season. The Broadway production's director, Globe associate artist Nicholas Martin, will stage the Christopher Durang farce here as well.
— AP/Carol Rosegg

David Hyde Pierce (left) and Sigourney Weaver in the Broadway production of "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike." The Old Globe Theatre has just announced that it is bringing the play to San Diego as part of the theater's 2013-14 season. The Broadway production's director, Globe associate artist Nicholas Martin, will stage the Christopher Durang farce here as well.
/ AP/Carol Rosegg

It’s not easy to wrap a theme around a theater season that takes in a currently running Broadway hit comedy (“Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike”), two starkly different takes on Shakespeare (“The Last Goodbye” and “The Winter’s Tale”), a Pulitzer-winning, war-related drama (“Water by the Spoonful”) and a brand-new, impressively pedigreed musical romcom (“Dog and Pony”).

The notion of trying to do so inspires Old Globe artistic director Barry Edelstein, as he discusses the theater’s just-announced 2013-14 season, to offer a spoofy example of stretching to make connections: “There are four plays in which everyone wears shoes."

But Edelstein will step up to claim at least a couple of common threads in the Globe lineup, whose unveiling is a milestone moment for San Diego, being the first since he left New York’s Public Theater to take on the Globe job late last year.

“The first thing I really wanted to do was honor the identity of the Globe as it’s been built over the decades,” Edelstein says. “And at the same time, (to suggest) directions I’d like to see the theater move in over the next few years.”

Noting the theater’s reputation for Shakespeare, musicals, new plays and classics, Edelstein adds: “This looks like a Globe season, but there is a freshness.”

Edelstein also points to the loose connection among a trio of challenging new plays that will go up in the Globe’s intimate, arena-style White Theatre: “The Few,” “Bethany” and 2012 Pulitzer-winner “Spoonful.”

“I made a particular choice this year to say, let’s take a particular set of plays in which young American writers are really thinking about the state of the country,” he says. “I really did want to encourage the audience to see those things together.”

One serendipitous subtheme, he adds, is the idea of time travel, brought out to some degree in “The Winter's Tale” — which Edelstein himself will direct — and in the revival of the J.B. Priestley classic “Time and the Conways.” (And maybe this is where the one show not mentioned yet, “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!,” fits in, since it has spanned 16 years and counting at the Globe.)

There’s one additional thread Edelstein doesn’t dwell on, but seems clear from surveying the season slate: The depth of the new artistic leader’s connections and reputation, evident in his landing of such marquee projects as the previously announced rock musical “The Last Goodbye” and the hot property “Vanya,” complete with its Broadway director, Globe associate artist Nicholas Martin.

(It’s also hard not to notice that several planned productions involve artists with links of late to the crosstown La Jolla Playhouse — including “Goodbye” director Alex Timbers and “Dog and Pony” director Roger Rees, who teamed on the La Jolla-sprung Tony-winner “Peter and the Starcatcher”; and “Dog and Pony” writer Rick Elice, the scribe behind “Starcatcher” as well as the massive Playhouse-launched hit “Jersey Boys.”)

A look at the complete lineup:

• “The Last Goodbye,” Sept. 20 to Nov. 3: This rock reconception of “Romeo and Juliet” is driven by the music of the late Jeff Buckley, whose arresting version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” will be woven into the show. The piece, conceived and adapted by Michael Kimmel, will go up on the main Shiley Stage.

• “The Few,” Sept. 28 to Oct. 27: Globe returnee Davis McCallum (“Back Back Back”) will direct the world-premiere comedy by rising playwright Samuel D. Hunter (“The Whale”) about a foundering Idaho newspaper that relies on personal ads place by long-haul truckers. The play is “sad, funny, but also heartbreaking,” says Edelstein, who calls Hunter “a writer of tremendous substance.” The production will do “what I think we should be doing: taking a brand-new work and giving it a launching pad to the American theater.”

• “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!,” Nov. 16 to Dec. 28: The beloved tradition returns, and so does the go-to local director James Vasquez. Edelstein says the show may be in for a little sprucing-up, but likely no major overhaul. He adds that the Globe will again offer an “autism-friendly” performance, as it did to great success last year.

• “The Winter’s Tale,” Feb. 8 to March 16, 2014: Edelstein staged (to a warm reception) Shakespeare’s lyrical, bittersweet story for New York’s Classic Stage Co. in 2003, with a cast that included David Strathairn as Leontes. The director’s return to it will mark the Globe’s first indoor Shakespeare production in many seasons. Edelstein says that among other things it’s a story about “sudden, surprising and inexplicable violence that hits a society,” something that speaks to these fearful, fitful times. The piece will again feature original music by Michael Torke.

• “Bethany,” Jan. 25 to Feb. 23, 2014: Laura Marks’ bristling, darkly comic work, getting its West Coast premiere, manages to “dramatize that moment of insanity” that led to the American housing bubble and subsequent economic disaster. It focuses on a single mom trying to keep things together in increasingly desperate straits. Gaye Taylor Upchurch, who directed this year’s off-Broadway premiere, and most of the original creative team return.

• “Time and the Conways,” March 29 to May 4, 2014: J.B. Priestley’s 1937 drama jumps back and forth in time to chronicle how pivotal choices by members of an English family play out years later. “I wanted to give people (the kind of) costume drama that San Diego clearly has an appetite for,” says Edelstein, noting the success of the recent “Pygmalion.” “But let’s do it in a way that’s visual and fresh.” His pick for director: Rebecca Taichman, who staged “Sleeping Beauty Wakes” and “Milk Like Sugar” for the Playhouse.

This 2012 photo released by The Hartman Group shows playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes. Hudes wrote the play "Water by the Spoonful." (AP Photo/The Hartman Group, Joshua Lehrer)— AP

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This 2012 photo released by The Hartman Group shows playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes. Hudes wrote the play "Water by the Spoonful." (AP Photo/The Hartman Group, Joshua Lehrer)
/ AP

• “Water by the Spoonful,” April 12 to May 11, 2014: Two-time Pulitzer finalist Quiara Alegría Hudes (once as the book writer for the hit musical “In the Heights”) won the big prize last year for this then little-known play, part of a trilogy focused in part on the fallout of war. (One of the characters happens to be a San Diegan.) Edward Torres, now helming the premiere in Chicago of Hudes’ “The Happiest Song Plays Last” (which joins “Elliot: A Soldier’s Fugue” in the trilogy), directs the California premiere.

• “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike,” May 17 to June 22, 2014: The latest work by Christopher Durang. that master of cutting comedy, is on a Broadway tear at the moment, with a cast that includes David Hyde Pierce and Sigourney Weaver. (There's also Tony Award buzz around the performance of Kristine Nielsen, who appeared in the Globe's "Anna Christie" last year.)

Although no Globe casting has been announced, Martin (who directed “Pygmalion” for the Globe) returns to his artistic home to stage the piece about a set of unfortunately named siblings.

• “Dog and Pony,” May 28 to June 29, 2014: Edelstein calls this one a “palate-cleanser” (after some of the more sobering works it follows), and a “goofy, fun, incredibly charming thing.” The world-premiere musical focuses on a screenwriting team whose personal and professional bonds go haywire when one of them gets a divorce. Tony-winner Rees directs, with a book by Elice and score by Michael Patrick Walker. This one will go up in the White theater-in-the-round.